In Seven Cities, the Latest Sunrise of 2026–27 Lands 6 to 22 Days After the Solstice
I computed sunrise for seven cities. Mornings keep darkening for 6 to 22 days after December 21, and the farther south you live, the longer it lasts.
In this article10 sections
For winter 2026–27, the latest sunrise in New York falls on January 4, 2027, at 7:20 a.m., which is 14 days after the December 21 solstice. The earliest sunset comes on December 7, two weeks before. Across the seven cities I computed, the lag between the shortest day and the latest sunrise ran from 6 days in Oslo to 22 days in Miami.
My interest is practical, and it comes from DontSnooze, an iPhone alarm app: which weeks make a 6:30 wake-up hardest, and when does the dark end? Mornings do not turn the corner on December 21; the evenings turn first, which is why late December feels like improvement while the mornings are still sliding.
How did I compute it?
I wrote about 60 lines of Python using the NOAA solar calculation, which builds on Jean Meeus’s Astronomical Algorithms (1991) for solar declination and the equation of time, with the usual 0.833° correction for refraction and the sun’s disk. For each of seven cities I generated sunrise and sunset for every day from October 3, 2026 to March 1, 2027 in local time. To keep the clock change from creating a false jump, I compared only days after daylight saving time ended, in each city’s standard-time offset.
As a sanity check, New York on December 21 came out at 7:17 sunrise and 4:32 sunset, within a minute or two of what almanacs list. I did not check every city against a published table, and I ignored elevation and local horizons. Treat the times as good to a minute or so and the dates as good to a few days.
What did the numbers say?
| City | Sunrise on Dec 21 | Latest sunrise | Days after solstice | Earliest sunset |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oslo | 9:18 | 9:20 on Dec 27 | 6 | 3:11 p.m. on Dec 16 |
| London | 8:04 | 8:06 on Dec 30 | 9 | 3:51 p.m. on Dec 12 |
| Chicago | 7:15 | 7:18 on Jan 3 | 13 | 4:19 p.m. on Dec 8 |
| New York | 7:17 | 7:20 on Jan 4 | 14 | 4:28 p.m. on Dec 7 |
| Madrid | 8:34 | 8:38 on Jan 4 | 14 | 5:48 p.m. on Dec 7 |
| Los Angeles | 6:55 | 6:59 on Jan 7 | 17 | 4:43 p.m. on Dec 4 |
| Miami | 7:03 | 7:09 on Jan 12 | 22 | 5:29 p.m. on Nov 29 |
The extra darkness is small in minutes: one to six minutes beyond the solstice morning in every city (times in the table are rounded to the minute). What the table shows more clearly is the timing, and the pattern across latitude, which I did not expect. The farther north, the sooner the morning turns. At the far end of the latitude scale, Tromsø has no sunrise at all from late November to mid-January, yet two large Norwegian surveys found no seasonal swing in sleep duration.
Why does the lag change with latitude?
Sunrise is solar noon minus half the day length. Solar noon drifts later by about half a minute a day in late December, because of the tilt of Earth’s axis and the shape of its orbit (the equation of time). That drift is the same everywhere. Half the day length, though, is changing at a rate that depends on latitude. Far from the equator, days lengthen quickly after the solstice, and the growing day overtakes the drifting noon within a week or so. Near the equator the days lengthen slowly, so the drift wins for longer.
That is why Oslo turns at 6 days and Miami at 22. The equation of time also explains why the sunrise curve is so flat at the bottom: for New York, sunrise stays within one minute of its latest time for 15 days, December 28 through January 11. I picked January 4 because it is the single day with the latest minute, and I would not defend one day over its neighbors.
Four more dates from the same calculation
When does sunrise get back to its December 21 time?
In my calculation New York is back to its solstice-morning sunrise of 7:17 a.m. on January 19, 2027, London to 8:04 on January 9, and Miami to 7:03 on February 4. The farther south, the longer the wait.
How early does Reykjavik turn?
Fast. At about 64 degrees north, my calculation puts Reykjavik’s latest sunrise on December 25, 2026, at 11:23 a.m., only four days after the solstice, which fits the latitude trend in the table.
Does the southern hemisphere show the same offset?
Yes, around its own solstice. I computed Sydney for 2027: the earliest sunset falls on June 12 at 4:53 p.m. and the latest sunrise on June 30 at 7:01 a.m., against a solstice on June 22 (Sydney clocks are on standard time by then).
When is the earliest sunset of the year in New York?
December 7, 2026, at 4:28 p.m. Eastern, which is almost a tie with December 8, two weeks before the shortest day.
What would I do with this?
I would stop treating January 1 as the start of lighter mornings. A resolution to get up earlier collides with the darkest stretch of the year, and the first two weeks of January sit on the plateau where sunrise barely moves. For the sunrise-and-wake-time question across more cities, an earlier table counts the days in 2027 when the sun rises after 6:30. If the dark mornings are the problem and not the discipline, five winter fixes ranked by evidence quality is the relevant read. In the US the clock changes on November 1, which I ran through the tz database separately.
What I could not check
I computed only this winter, and only one southern-hemisphere city. The size of the lag shifts by a day or two from year to year, and a few dates are near-ties at the second level: Miami’s latest sunrise is almost identical on January 12 and 13. I also ignored elevation and local horizons, so a valley town will see different times from the airport-grade figures here.